Conclusions

This book's journey through medieval Barcelona began with a map. Although this particular example of the genre is not the proportional visualization of blocks, streets, and landmarks we expect when we look at a map today, it does perform a deeper function of mapping in that it serves as an argument about human relationships—with other humans, with the built and natural environments, and with structures of power. The chapters of this book have, in their own way, attempted to do something similar by following several historical actors as they navigated a year of crisis in the food system of medieval Barcelona in order to explore each one's “map” of the city. Some of these maps ended at the city walls, while others extended outward regionally or even into the Mediterranean. The connections that lent each one coherence were variously bonds of family, of political loyalties, of social hierarchy, of economic interests, and of religious affiliations; the boundaries of each were defined, patrolled, and sometimes challenged by municipal ordinances, by external authorities like the monarchy or the Church, and occasionally by violence.

The chapters of this book have focused on individual perspectives on a year in the life of one medieval city. But each of these experiences of medieval Barcelona was embedded in longer-running contexts, from Barcelona's emergence as a Mediterranean commercial power to the links between wealthy rentiers and merchant-investors and the municipal government to the long history of Jews in Catalonia. Even the weather patterns that set off the famine itself were only the most recent and severe manifestation of a new climate pattern that had been emerging over the previous several decades. The Barcelona of 1333/1334 arose from that year's unique combination of these underlying structures with the specific events and triggers of that year. The stories of the city did not end when the famine did but continued to reverberate for the remainder of the city's medieval period. Barcelona's Mediterranean war with Genoa would sputter off and on for decades, drawing in other cities and polities and expanding a dispute between the two parties into a century-long Mediterranean-wide conflict. The shift in climate that began in the early 1300s would increase the frequency and severity of weather events and crop failures, culminating in the catastrophic shortages that afflicted the city in the 1370s. Tensions between Barcelona's Christians and Jews would continue to ratchet up over the course of the fourteenth century, eventually exploding in a devastating attack on the call in 1391 that marked the beginning of the end for the city's vibrant Jewish community. The conflicts between social groups and the political factions that represented them would deepen and broaden, eventually becoming entangled with disputes over royal succession and the fifteenth-century Catalan Civil War.

If 1333/1334 was but a single point in several long-running stories of the city, why focus on this one year? Recently, historians of food and famine in Barcelona have become more wary of applying the “first bad year” label to 1333/1334, pointing out that this was in no way the first major cycle of food shortage in recent memory. When they do use the phrase, they render it in quotation marks—less to signal the quote than as an ironic wink shared with the modern reader, disassociating us from a contemporary representation that we now read as hyperbolic or even facile. Yet the way medieval Barcelonans spoke of and responded to the events of that year suggests a sense among contemporary observers that there was indeed something extraordinary about 1333/1334, in particular. It is, therefore, only good historical practice to take the notion of a “first bad year” seriously (even if not literally), as doing so brings us closer to understanding the perspectives of the people who lived through it.

These perspectives are what lie at the heart of this book's portrayal of one medieval city. The foregoing chapters, taken individually, illustrate one aim of this book: to show that the way we tell the history of any one city, even for a single moment in time, depends on whose vantage point we adopt. Each of the protagonists featured in the chapters has offered us a distinct way of seeing the city, but it is only in considering their stories together that the broader argument of this book emerges: that the essence of the city lies not in any single one of these perspectives but rather in the way they wove together. The points of entanglement—the meeting of municipal jurisdiction and royal sovereignty, the confrontation of government authority with popular sentiment, the overlap between urban identities and those that extended beyond the city walls—serve to underline the flexibility both within and between networks that allowed the city to respond to change while remaining a coherent entity. Sites of entanglement might even temporarily be embodied in the fluid identities of a single individual: the merchant captain who was also both an officer of the city government and a sometime smuggler and pirate; the bailiff who was the local representative of royal authority but who was simultaneously embedded in the social and cultural currents of the city he helped to regulate; the elected urban functionary who symbolized an oppressive authority to the populace but had little real power compared to many of his colleagues in the city government. Although we can, to a certain degree, tell the story of a city by making one group within its society—its merchants, its rulers, its marginalized or its minoritized populations—simultaneously our focus and our vantage point, none exists separately from the others. Because each of these versions of the city is, at its core, a web of relationships, every one of them will sooner or later intersect or even briefly intertwine with one or more of the others, and each of these points of encounter provides an opportunity for one register of the medieval city to influence another.

Each of this book's protagonists has functioned as a sort of synecdoche for a particular way of conceiving of the city, demonstrating both how different conceptual maps of medieval Barcelona responded to their own unique dynamics and how they influenced one another. But these were also real people who, for one moment in time, in a single difficult year, shared the city. Did Pere Juyol, supervising the grain market one day in early 1334, catch sight of two harassed-looking Portuguese merchants elbowing their way through the market crowd toward the veguer's court that loomed above it? Was Galceran Marquet among the well-to-do worshippers in the cathedral who heard Bernat Despuig declaim his jeremiad against the council during Christmas services? Did Bonadona overhear talk in the streets of the call about the summit that the Christians’ archbishop and the prince had convened and hope for its success and a speedy return of grain to the market? These are, of course, imagined encounters. But they drive home the point that these separate cities were also the same city: a layered entity made up of webs of individual relationships that touched upon and influenced one another in sometimes unexpected ways.

The project of this book has been to use a single year as a way to think about one medieval city during a moment of crisis that brought the submerged bonds within or between the city's many webs of association to the surface. Over the course of this book's chapters, I hope to have hinted at the complex nature of this problem by treating Barcelona as a composite of individual stories and perhaps to chart the beginnings of a conversation that historians of cities in other times and places might take up. The city that emerges at the end of an exploration like the one in these pages is an entity that is more than the sum of its parts. It is by following the paths of the actors who were part of the city in this one bad year and by being alert to the ways that these paths both diverged from and entangled with one another that we may catch the occasional glimpse of the elusive whole.